Jason Ur
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 116782 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jason Ur |
| NOMBRES | Jason |
| APELLIDO | Ur |
| FIRMA | UR J |
| AFILIACIONES | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1806-6385 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 367 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
The Site of Gird Qalachogan, Iraqi Kurdistan
Hellenistic Landscapes and Seleucid Control in Mesopotamia
In this article we discuss the archaeological landscapes of the Erbil plain during the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE-mid second century BCE) based on the data collected during the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) between 2012 and 2019. We use a landscape archaeology approach to trace patterns of habitation, migration, land exploitation, and water management from the Iron Age to the early first millennium CE. Over the course …
Succeeding Corona
Over the past 25 years, CORONA satellite imagery has become an integral part of archaeological research, especially for arid, sparsely vegetated regions such as the Middle East. Since 2020, a new archive of satellite imagery gathered by the US spy satellite programme that succeeded CORONA-HEXAGON-has become widely available for download via the United States Geological Survey. This photographic archive has enormous potential for archaeological re…
The Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey
The Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) investigates settlement and land use from the Neolithic to the present in the Erbil Governorate of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which includes a large portion of the core of the Assyrian Empire. In seven field seasons, it has documented a broad settlement landscape in a region of great social and political importance, especially in the Bronze and Iron Ages, including 728 archaeological sites. Its fiel…
Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2 Aerial Imagery
Recently declassified photographs taken by U2 spy planes in the 1950s and 1960s provide an important new source of historical aerial imagery useful for Eurasian archaeology. Like other sources of historical imagery, U2 photos provide a window into the past, before modern agriculture and development destroyed many archaeological sites. U2 imagery is older and in many cases higher resolution than CORONA spy satellite imagery, the other major source…
The Birth of Cities in Ancient West Asia
The Archaeological Renaissance in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
After an absence of over two decades, foreign archaeology has returned in earnest to one of the "cradles of civilization" in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Two wars, international sanctions, and internal unrest had together brought archaeological research nearly to a standstill; only a few under-funded Iraqi teams and a handful of intrepid Europeans attempted fieldwork following the first Gulf War of 1991. Following a decline in political violence…
Challenges in Early Urbanism
Whenever I read an abstract that decries the under theorization of anything and states its intention to enhance debate, I mentally prepare myself for a heavy dose of criticism of existing scholarsh
Tony Wilkinson and the water history of the Near East
Ritual and Identity in Rural Mesopotamia
International audience
Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia
The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or…
Jane Jacobs' 'Cities First' Model and Archaeological Reality
InThe Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her 'cities first' mode…
Ancient Cities and Landscapes in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
In 2012, the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) conducted its first season of fieldwork. The project's goal is the complete mapping of the archaeological landscape of Erbil, with an emphasis on the Neo-Assyrian and Hellenistic periods. It will test the hypothesis that the Neo-Assyrian landscape was closely planned. This first report emphasizes the project's field methodology, especially the use of a variety of satellite remote sensing image…
Spying on the Past
Near Eastern archaeology has its origins in the scramble for great objects, as the great imperial powers of the nineteenth century filled their national museums. Since that time, the questions that archaeologists seek to answer have diversified. We are no longer interested only in the lives of kings; we are more concerned with society generally. Our questions now demand a perspective beyond the excavation trench; we have to consider entire landsc…
Is Poverty in Our Genes
We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that "the high degree of diversity among African popula…
Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in Northern Mesopotamia at a large scale
The landscapes of the Near East show both the first settlements and the longest trajectories of settlement systems. Mounding is a characteristic property of these settlement sites, resulting from millennia of continuing settlement activity at distinguished places. So far, however, this defining feature of ancient settlements has not received much attention, or even been the subject of systematic evaluation. We propose a remote sensing approach fo…
The Architecture and Pottery of a Late Third-Millennium Residential Quarter at Tell Hamoukar, North-Eastern Syria
The 2001 excavations in Area H on Hamoukar's lower town produced a wealth of information on a residential neighbourhood of a late third-millennium BC city. The excavations were intended to address several issues, including chronology, urban form and the final abandonment of the site. Toward these ends, a broad exposure of over 400 m 2 was opened, revealing a prosperous neighbourhood that had been sacked and abruptly abandoned. This report address…
The Spatial Dimensions of Early Mesopotamian Urbanism
The 2003–2006 Suburban Survey at Tell Brak investigated the spatial dimensions of the city's urban origins and evolution via intensive systematic surface survey. This report places this research in the broader context of research on Near Eastern urban origins and development, describes the survey and remote sensing methods and summarises the results, which challenge several long-held models for the timing and geographical origins of urbanism in t…
The Myth of Isolated Civilizations What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West . By David Wengrow. Oxford
Proto-Urbanism in the Late 5th Millennium BC
Excavation and systematic surface collection since 1999 have revealed the outlines of a unique site in Northern Mesopotamia. Khirbat al-Fakhar is an extensive settlement of 300 ha, primarily occupied during the LC 1-2 periods (ca 4400-3800 cal. BC). Systematic surface collection, satellite imagery analysis, and targeted excavation allow a preliminary characterization of its settlement, in particular the abundance of evidence for intensive obsidia…
Euphrates River Valley Settlement
Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400–2000 BC
The geoarchaeology of route systems in northern Syria
Linear valleys, termed hollow ways, form a distinctive feature of the North Syrian Bronze Age landscape, but few have been described in detail or excavated. This paper examines the geoarchaeology of hollow way route systems in northern Syria at three scales of analysis: (1) from satellite imagery, at which scale it is possible to examine patterns of hollow ways over very large areas; (2) in the field, where cleaned sections supply ground control …
Where has the water come from
past water management and social relations to water use have become increasingly relevant to our understanding of future scenarios of water use. Second, recently many research findings demonstrating high-quality scholarship on water history have been published in diverse journals. While the recent publication of some of these articles focused on water history suggests that the field is expanding in both size and scope, it also shows that the fiel…
Pastoral Nomads of the 2nd and 3rd Millennia A.D. on the Upper Tigris River, Turkey
The importance of non-sedentary pastoralist groups in the social and political history of Mesopotamia has long been appreciated from the perspective of ancient texts and ethnohistorical sources, but empirical evidence from archaeology has been lacking. In two field seasons, the Hirbemerdon Tepe Survey (HMTS) in Diyarbakir province, southeastern Turkey, has recovered a variety of sites and landscape features associated with pastoral nomadic occupa…
Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400–2000 BC
Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia
The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or…
Corona Satellite Photography and Ancient Road Networks
Middle-eastern archaeologists are winning new information from declassified military photographs taken 25 years ago. This study shows how pictures of north-eastern Syria are revealing the routeways, and by inference the agricultural systems of Mesopotamia in the early Bronze Age
Urbanization within a Dynamic Environment
Here agent-based models are employed to explore the behavior of small communities and their associated economic systems within an area of climatically marginal environment in northern Syria and Iraq. The examples, drawn from late prehistoric and Bronze Age societies that developed at the onset of urbanization, show how small communities might respond to various resource stresses and environmental fluctuations. The computer simulations demonstrate…
Early Mesopotamian urbanism
For many years, the southern Mesopotamia of Ur and Uruk, ancient Sumer, has been seen as the origin centre of civilisation and cities: 'The urban implosion of late-fourth- and early-third-millennium Mesopotamia resulted in a massive population shift into large sites' said Nissen in 1988. 'These new city-states set the pattern for Mesopotamia as the heartland of cities' (Adams 1981; Yoffee 1998). And for Stone & Zimansky (2005) 'Remains of the wor…
The geoarchaeology of route systems in northern Syria
Linear valleys, termed hollow ways, form a distinctive feature of the North Syrian Bronze Age landscape, but few have been described in detail or excavated. This paper examines the geoarchaeology of hollow way route systems in northern Syria at three scales of analysis: (1) from satellite imagery, at which scale it is possible to examine patterns of hollow ways over very large areas; (2) in the field, where cleaned sections supply ground control …
Proto-Urbanism in the Late 5th Millennium BC
Excavation and systematic surface collection since 1999 have revealed the outlines of a unique site in Northern Mesopotamia. Khirbat al-Fakhar is an extensive settlement of 300 ha, primarily occupied during the LC 1-2 periods (ca 4400-3800 cal. BC). Systematic surface collection, satellite imagery analysis, and targeted excavation allow a preliminary characterization of its settlement, in particular the abundance of evidence for intensive obsidia…
Spying on the Past
Near Eastern archaeology has its origins in the scramble for great objects, as the great imperial powers of the nineteenth century filled their national museums. Since that time, the questions that archaeologists seek to answer have diversified. We are no longer interested only in the lives of kings; we are more concerned with society generally. Our questions now demand a perspective beyond the excavation trench; we have to consider entire landsc…
Formation and destruction of pastoral and irrigation landscapes on the Mughan Steppe, north-western Iran
CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes - some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a 'signature landscape' belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA - in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of th…
Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2 Aerial Imagery
Recently declassified photographs taken by U2 spy planes in the 1950s and 1960s provide an important new source of historical aerial imagery useful for Eurasian archaeology. Like other sources of historical imagery, U2 photos provide a window into the past, before modern agriculture and development destroyed many archaeological sites. U2 imagery is older and in many cases higher resolution than CORONA spy satellite imagery, the other major source…
The Archaeological Renaissance in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
After an absence of over two decades, foreign archaeology has returned in earnest to one of the "cradles of civilization" in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Two wars, international sanctions, and internal unrest had together brought archaeological research nearly to a standstill; only a few under-funded Iraqi teams and a handful of intrepid Europeans attempted fieldwork following the first Gulf War of 1991. Following a decline in political violence…
Pastoral Nomads of the 2nd and 3rd Millennia A.D. on the Upper Tigris River, Turkey
The importance of non-sedentary pastoralist groups in the social and political history of Mesopotamia has long been appreciated from the perspective of ancient texts and ethnohistorical sources, but empirical evidence from archaeology has been lacking. In two field seasons, the Hirbemerdon Tepe Survey (HMTS) in Diyarbakir province, southeastern Turkey, has recovered a variety of sites and landscape features associated with pastoral nomadic occupa…
Succeeding Corona
Over the past 25 years, CORONA satellite imagery has become an integral part of archaeological research, especially for arid, sparsely vegetated regions such as the Middle East. Since 2020, a new archive of satellite imagery gathered by the US spy satellite programme that succeeded CORONA-HEXAGON-has become widely available for download via the United States Geological Survey. This photographic archive has enormous potential for archaeological re…
Jane Jacobs' 'Cities First' Model and Archaeological Reality
InThe Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her 'cities first' mode…
The Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project 2006-2007
International audience
Is Poverty in Our Genes
We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that "the high degree of diversity among African popula…
Ritual and Identity in Rural Mesopotamia
International audience
Where has the water come from
past water management and social relations to water use have become increasingly relevant to our understanding of future scenarios of water use. Second, recently many research findings demonstrating high-quality scholarship on water history have been published in diverse journals. While the recent publication of some of these articles focused on water history suggests that the field is expanding in both size and scope, it also shows that the fiel…
Hellenistic Landscapes and Seleucid Control in Mesopotamia
In this article we discuss the archaeological landscapes of the Erbil plain during the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE-mid second century BCE) based on the data collected during the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) between 2012 and 2019. We use a landscape archaeology approach to trace patterns of habitation, migration, land exploitation, and water management from the Iron Age to the early first millennium CE. Over the course …
Challenges in Early Urbanism
Whenever I read an abstract that decries the under theorization of anything and states its intention to enhance debate, I mentally prepare myself for a heavy dose of criticism of existing scholarsh
Surface Collection and Offsite Studies at Tell Hamoukar, 1999
The new program of excavations of the Syrian-American Expedition to Tell Hamoukar, Hassake province, northeastern Syria, began with an initial season in Fall 1999. The project includes among its goals the study of the expansion and contraction of settlement on the site, as well as the relationship of the urbanization process on Hamoukar to regional settlement trends. Our initial step was to document the chronology and scale of this process throug…
First Season of Syrian-American Investigations at Hamoukar, Hasekeh Province
In 1999, the joint expedition of the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago initiated excavations and surface reconnaissance at the site of Tell Hamoukar in the northeastern corner of Hassekeh Province (Figs. 1–2). We need to acknowledge, with gratitude, the help and encouragement rendered by Dr Sultan Muhesen, then Director General of Antiquities, and by Sayyid Abdul Messieh Bagdo, of th…
Corona Satellite Photography and Ancient Road Networks
Middle-eastern archaeologists are winning new information from declassified military photographs taken 25 years ago. This study shows how pictures of north-eastern Syria are revealing the routeways, and by inference the agricultural systems of Mesopotamia in the early Bronze Age
Sennacherib's northern Assyrian canals
In discussions of the agricultural economies of ancient Mesopotamia, scholars commonly make a sharp distinction between intensive irrigation in the south and extensive rain-fed farming in the north (Weiss 1986; Bagg 2000: 283). In popular as well as academic publications Babylonia is strongly associated with canals, and when one thinks of large state-sponsored initiatives the massive integrated network of canals built by the Sasanian rulers of so…
Landscape and Settlement in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
Archaeological surveys and satellite images are used to provide insights into the structure and scale of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. When this empire attained its peak during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., it resulted in a distinct imprint on the landscape which differs significantly from that of the Bronze Age. In the Neo-Assyrian period, capital cities attained unprecedented size, rural settlement patterns were predominantly dispersed, the…
Early Mesopotamian urbanism
For many years, the southern Mesopotamia of Ur and Uruk, ancient Sumer, has been seen as the origin centre of civilisation and cities: 'The urban implosion of late-fourth- and early-third-millennium Mesopotamia resulted in a massive population shift into large sites' said Nissen in 1988. 'These new city-states set the pattern for Mesopotamia as the heartland of cities' (Adams 1981; Yoffee 1998). And for Stone & Zimansky (2005) 'Remains of the wor…
Formation and destruction of pastoral and irrigation landscapes on the Mughan Steppe, north-western Iran
CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes - some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a 'signature landscape' belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA - in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of th…
Urbanization within a Dynamic Environment
Here agent-based models are employed to explore the behavior of small communities and their associated economic systems within an area of climatically marginal environment in northern Syria and Iraq. The examples, drawn from late prehistoric and Bronze Age societies that developed at the onset of urbanization, show how small communities might respond to various resource stresses and environmental fluctuations. The computer simulations demonstrate…
The Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project 2006-2007
International audience
Where has the water come from
past water management and social relations to water use have become increasingly relevant to our understanding of future scenarios of water use. Second, recently many research findings demonstrating high-quality scholarship on water history have been published in diverse journals. While the recent publication of some of these articles focused on water history suggests that the field is expanding in both size and scope, it also shows that the fiel…
Pastoral Nomads of the 2nd and 3rd Millennia A.D. on the Upper Tigris River, Turkey
The importance of non-sedentary pastoralist groups in the social and political history of Mesopotamia has long been appreciated from the perspective of ancient texts and ethnohistorical sources, but empirical evidence from archaeology has been lacking. In two field seasons, the Hirbemerdon Tepe Survey (HMTS) in Diyarbakir province, southeastern Turkey, has recovered a variety of sites and landscape features associated with pastoral nomadic occupa…
Euphrates River Valley Settlement
Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400–2000 BC
The geoarchaeology of route systems in northern Syria
Linear valleys, termed hollow ways, form a distinctive feature of the North Syrian Bronze Age landscape, but few have been described in detail or excavated. This paper examines the geoarchaeology of hollow way route systems in northern Syria at three scales of analysis: (1) from satellite imagery, at which scale it is possible to examine patterns of hollow ways over very large areas; (2) in the field, where cleaned sections supply ground control …
The Architecture and Pottery of a Late Third-Millennium Residential Quarter at Tell Hamoukar, North-Eastern Syria
The 2001 excavations in Area H on Hamoukar's lower town produced a wealth of information on a residential neighbourhood of a late third-millennium BC city. The excavations were intended to address several issues, including chronology, urban form and the final abandonment of the site. Toward these ends, a broad exposure of over 400 m 2 was opened, revealing a prosperous neighbourhood that had been sacked and abruptly abandoned. This report address…
The Spatial Dimensions of Early Mesopotamian Urbanism
The 2003–2006 Suburban Survey at Tell Brak investigated the spatial dimensions of the city's urban origins and evolution via intensive systematic surface survey. This report places this research in the broader context of research on Near Eastern urban origins and development, describes the survey and remote sensing methods and summarises the results, which challenge several long-held models for the timing and geographical origins of urbanism in t…
The Myth of Isolated Civilizations What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West . By David Wengrow. Oxford
Proto-Urbanism in the Late 5th Millennium BC
Excavation and systematic surface collection since 1999 have revealed the outlines of a unique site in Northern Mesopotamia. Khirbat al-Fakhar is an extensive settlement of 300 ha, primarily occupied during the LC 1-2 periods (ca 4400-3800 cal. BC). Systematic surface collection, satellite imagery analysis, and targeted excavation allow a preliminary characterization of its settlement, in particular the abundance of evidence for intensive obsidia…
Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in Northern Mesopotamia at a large scale
The landscapes of the Near East show both the first settlements and the longest trajectories of settlement systems. Mounding is a characteristic property of these settlement sites, resulting from millennia of continuing settlement activity at distinguished places. So far, however, this defining feature of ancient settlements has not received much attention, or even been the subject of systematic evaluation. We propose a remote sensing approach fo…
Ancient Cities and Landscapes in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
In 2012, the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) conducted its first season of fieldwork. The project's goal is the complete mapping of the archaeological landscape of Erbil, with an emphasis on the Neo-Assyrian and Hellenistic periods. It will test the hypothesis that the Neo-Assyrian landscape was closely planned. This first report emphasizes the project's field methodology, especially the use of a variety of satellite remote sensing image…
Spying on the Past
Near Eastern archaeology has its origins in the scramble for great objects, as the great imperial powers of the nineteenth century filled their national museums. Since that time, the questions that archaeologists seek to answer have diversified. We are no longer interested only in the lives of kings; we are more concerned with society generally. Our questions now demand a perspective beyond the excavation trench; we have to consider entire landsc…
Is Poverty in Our Genes
We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that "the high degree of diversity among African popula…
Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia
The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or…
Jane Jacobs' 'Cities First' Model and Archaeological Reality
InThe Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her 'cities first' mode…
Tony Wilkinson and the water history of the Near East
Archaeology (30 obras) · Geography (29 obras) · History (25 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (24 obras) · Archaeological Research and Protection (19 obras) · Ancient history (16 obras) · Mesopotamia (15 obras) · Ancient Near East History (12 obras) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (12 obras) · History (10 obras)